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Stop sharing this bullshit. It is a stupendously simplistic view that is propagated by those wanting to get in the way of cheap renewables.
Yes, it makes sense in some cases to cover parking lots, but it increases the price and complexity many folds and the areas needed in open land are next to nothing compared to the area being used to grow energy crops today.
The meme should be “stop covering our land with fertilized, pesticide covered corn and rapeseed that go into combustion engines, cover it with solar instead”
Technology connections has a video where part of this is explained.
soooo much this. Also stop building parking lots, people using cars need higher pressure to use other means of transportation. Car pool etc.
The meme should be “stop covering our land with fertilized, pesticide covered corn and rapeseed that go into combustion engines, cover it with solar instead”
It’s doubly stupid cause it’s just greenwashing a fucking carpark of all things. Do they not see the irony here?
Covering parking lots has the benefit of also protecting parked vehicles from sunlight and weather, meaning your car isn’t blazing hot when you return to it and you can unload any purchases in peace.
Why would installing panels over a parking lot be many times more expensive than installing them in any other open, flat area? Is it having to bury the power lines?
It’s called Agrovoltaics and it works pretty damn good,if you do it right.
The pairing can also offer some synergies. Solar panels can help moderate ground temperatures, provide shelter for livestock and help plants retain moisture.[6] For farmers the ability to produce electricity can help diversify their income stream.
Solar panels block light, which means that dual use systems involve trade-offs between crop yield, crop quality, and energy production.[7] Some crops/livestock benefit from the increased shade, obviating the trade-off,[8] such as green leafy vegetables, and spices such as turmeric and ginger, whereas staple crops such as wheat, rice, soybeans or pulses require more sun.[9] Agrivoltaics has also been used at scale in arid and semi-arid regions to stabilize soils, reduce dust storm intensity, increase vegetation cover, provide forage for livestock, and curb desertification, notably in northern China.[10][11]
The picture in the op doesn’t look like agrivoltaics though. Compared to the agrivoltaics examples of the wiki article, the panels in the op are more densely placed, placed flatter, and placed closer to the ground. Nothing is getting harvested there, the most they could do is keep rabbits under them. From what I’ve seen in person, the non agri kind with panels over monoculture grass fields is much more common than agrivoltaics with cultivated fields.
In the US it makes sense. Much of our corn is grown for ethanol so ot can be used for fuel. Replace that with solar and we reduce our reliance on a monocrop and end up with far far more power.
They also use lots of irrigation from aquifers in the Great Plains, so they’ll need less irrigation and the shading will help a tiny bit with replenishing the aquifer.
In northern Europe these solar fields make no sense at all to me though. When I see something like the fields below in my temperate marine climate, then I can’t help but think of the forest that could have been there.
Turning it back into a forest will never happen when the land owner needs to pay taxes on the land and thus need to make income of the land. These solar fields are usually on private property. Not public land. Either they put windmills and solar on the fields or they raise cattle or grow crops. Which one is better for the environment overall?
If you destroy existing forest to make a farm, maybe. But if it’s an empty field and you want to do something with it, making it into a forest makes little sense. It’s complicated, very expensive, and doesn’t do much. Just let natural forests do their things, allow them to expand if you want more forests, don’t make one from scratch.
Making wild forests in a temperate climate is not complicated at all. Stamp a bunch of seeds into the ground, fence it off to keep grazers away, wait a few years, and boom there’s a new forest. Once it gets started, nature knows just fine how to grow forests, they’ve been around far longer than our meddling after all. The problem is humans, who need capital and incentives to let nature do it’s thing. Making the forest is cheap, buying the land is expensive. And a wild forest has little earning potential, so for private landholders it makes no financial sense.
But if there were incentives, then these solar panels could have been put above existing hardened surfaces (roads, parkings), and the unhardened land could have been returned to nature. We’d have both the solar panel fields and the forest. It requires a much larger up front investment, which is why it’s not going to happen without government incentives, and to get those, political will is needed, which is why it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
And we should absolutely be making more forests from scratch, Europe has a massive deforestation problem. Reforestation is already an official policy goal in the EU and in most (I assume) EU countries, and this could be one of the ways of achieving those goals.
I’m not an expert by any stretch, but through no fault of my own, I know my way around agriculture, and I know my way around planting and removing trees. Making a forest, a proper forest, is probably the furthest thing from “stamping a bunch of seeds into the ground” you can imagine. You can’t even grow trees from seeds manually, that just doesn’t work on any scale. You plant saplings that you spend years caring for, and then they die on you and you start it all over. The way you described is the way to get a wild meadow, but the one dominated by some weed monocrop, and exclusively the one you don’t want. You will have a country-wide infestation of poisonous hogweed that kills all life around it before you’ll get one tree the way you want it to be.
Forest requires very specific amount of biodiversity, soil characteristics, layers of biomass influencing each other, specific insects and animals, it needs tens, and in specific cases, hundreds of kilometers of space, it needs seasonal changes, in some cases cycles of burning, and most importantly, it needs time. Generations of trees need to grow and die and grow and die again in order for a forest to be sustainable and not fragile. Forest isn’t a bunch of trees haphazardly put in an empty parking lot, it’s a life long project that is not guaranteed to succeed by any stretch.
Europe has the deforestation problem because forests are biomes with their own complicated rules, not a bunch of seeds thrown in an area half a kilometer wide between a road and a waste treatment facility.I’ve seen forest sprout up in abandoned dead areas without any human assistance. It takes about 2 decades of being left alone to get enough young growth to start being called a forest, but not really more than that. And it would take generations more to be called an old “real” forest, but it has to start somewhere. To rehabilitate long dead soil it might take what you describe, but turning an old meadow into a wild area that will eventually turn into a forest, does not need human intervention. It just requires to be left alone. In my climate that is. Claiming that forests can’t grow without human assistance is absolute nonsense, forests grew just fine before humans came along.
And as further proof that I don’t live in fantasialand with my belief that forests can grow without human intervention, here’s 2 links with examples: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_rewilding https://www.rewildingmag.com/passive-rewilding-natural-reforestation/
How many times is this gonna get posted? It gets dunked on every time too…
I’m convinced this is astroturfing in the same vein as the “Just stop oil” protesters that do all that trolly shit. The goal is for you to view green technologies negatively by association, and to feel like the science and decision-making behind them is suspect.
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Not only to feed cattle, also to make ethanol to be used as fuel 🤦♂️
This is emotionally resonant but it’s actually sometimes better to cover fields. The right thing is not always intuitive.
Yup, like, what is it replacing? If it’s food that goes directly to humans, let’s not do that. If it’s corn for ethanol, that has little worth. Covering it with solar panels isn’t terrible by any means.
I feel like people still haven’t internalized just how much of our fields go to corn for ethanol
Exactly, and those take resources to grow. Water, fertilizer, pesticide, herbicide, oil, farm equipment, and so on.
Because it’s not necessarily correct. There’s so many fields dedicated to growing energy plants that covering just a part of those would be sufficient to electrify the entire transport sector. That’s just fields for plants for Biofuels etc., not a single beautiful picturesque meadow, not a single field that grows food.
Of course covering car parks is a good idea too, but it’s more expensive, and it’s a climate change denier’s strawman that covering fields would supposedly endanger our food supply or ruin our landscapes.
In the EU at least farmers are getting paid to not grow on certain fields in order to hold crop prices stable.
It’s a good idea to put them to produce smething else.
Knowing our great bureaucracy I bet they lose the subsidy if they put solar panels on those fields.
At least there is no Big Chip lobbying against it.
It’s SO sunny here that I’d probably get better results in my garden by shading it under solar panels, there are plenty of places they help ag, not harm it. You don’t have to space them so tightly or have them completely flat like that picture.
I can’t imagine. It’s so cloudy here that many properties are evaluated as unsuitable for solar if they have even the slightest other obstructions. Overall solar has a super low adoption rate because most buyers don’t even break even over the life of the installation.
We have clouds, but in the subtropics solar does pay for itself eventually, the sunlight is so direct. I don’t want panels on my roof (we finally got everything hurricane -rated, metal roof, storm windows, and insurers here will sometimes drop houses with solar panels on the roof) but would like solar carport, back porch, and if it was possible, yeah over the garden but angled for the dappled light - I lose a lot more food plants to too much bright sun, than any other factor.
Um, they do? Half the retail stores in my area have solar panels in the parking lot.
Lucky. The only solar panels in my local retail parking lots are the ones powering the ALPRs they installed there.
Car parks are horrible in and off themselves but the American mind cannot comprehend such a take
Korea recently passed a law that parking lots above a certain size need to have solar panels
Also warehouses. Also houses. Also literally any structure that already exists that isn’t nature. If it is an energy consuming building, it should have solar panels on it. Parking lots count because cars are energy consuming devices.
If any of the billionaires actually cared about the planet or the human race, they would just dump money at a huge loss into making solar panels cost pennies.
I want solar panel Venetian blinds on my windows. The entire exterior of my car should be solar panels. Every roof everywhere should be solar panels.
I want the to see so much money poured into it that for $35 I could get a t-shirt with a USBC port that charges my fucking phone when I’m out in the sun.
But that doesnt make money. I guess the lives of a few hundred assholes is more important than making some super awesome shit that benefits everybody.
I fucking hate this time line.
Lemmy ragebait
To be fair in my small town alone there are 2 fields with solar panels. No crops, no animal grazing, just mowed grass and panels. People here act like that doesn’t exist and every green field with pannels is agrivoltaics, which isn’t strictly true. Maybe their newer installations and need a few years to mature? Idk the case was the same last 2 states I lived in, ma and ri both had fields with pannels that were very much single use. I thing agrivoltaics is freaking sweet, just like I think covering car parks, roofs, etc is sick. Why waste any space? ESPECIALLY spaced we have already wrecked, no reason not to have pannels on every roof. I say that without having my own but some day soonish…
I see this dumb shit all over Facebook too.
And roofs. And roads. And maybe roadroofs.
Convert parking lots to fields & sparingly cover them with solar panels?
Parking lots need to be the 6 levels underneath a soccer field anyway.
This would work well in old mall parking lots -
